Starting with his role in Blue Velvet as that nice college boy so jazzed to return a severed ear to its rightful owner, Kyle MacLachlan has landed two decades' worth of steady gigs largely by playing a squeaky-clean guy tweaked just enough to be a little, as mother used to say...different. First, there was Special Agent Dale Cooper on Twin Peaks, a man with an almost erotic attachment to cherry pie, and now there's Orson Hodge on Desperate Housewives, Breer's clean-freak dentist of a husband, who appears to get his biggest jollies from wearing dishwashing gloves and inhaling the scent of Lysol. Those looking for a brief, less creepy glimpse of the 49-year-old can see him alongside America Ferrara in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Though MacLachlan and his wife of six years, PR powerhouse and Project Runway producer Desiree Gruber, are about to become first-time parents, a certain furry duo named Mookie and Sam might convince you that they've had children for some time now.

ELLE : You have a truly luxuriant head of hair. I confess I once sat behind you at a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden and I couldn't concentrate on the show because I was so absorbed in studying your head.

KYLE MACLACHLAN : I got too much hair. It's crazy. And Desiree has a lot of hair. We shouldn't be surprised if our baby comes out looking like a gorilla. If I had a head like Patrick Stewart's, I'd just cut it all off.

KM : My mother. She was mostly even-tempered, but when she blew, she was like a volcano. I remember when I was really little, a bunch of older neighborhood kids came over, and we were all building this tree house. Somebody said, "We should make it the Playboy Club." I had no idea what Playboy was, but I made a wooden sign that said PLAYBOY CLUB and put it on our tree fort. Well, my mom saw it and I remember the call that came from inside the house echoing through the yard, in front of all the cool kids. Oh, it was grim. Then I got the arm hang with one of her hands and the spank with the other—all the way to the house.

ELLE : A writer once referred to your on-screen persona as "Mr. Creepy." If I interviewed all the women you'd ever dated, would they have any such associations of you?

KM : Jeez. I don't know if I'm so creepy.

ELLE : How do you show your wife you love her?

KM : I bring her flowers or if there's something she has a real hankering for. Early in her pregnancy she had a craving for mustard, so I had a tiny pot of yellow Heinz mustard that I always carried around, just in case.

ELLE : I think carrying mustard around in your pocket might qualify as a creepy trait.

KM : There you go. Little things you don't know.

ELLE : You and your wife obviously love your Jack Russell, Mookie, and little mutt, Sam: You've created a website for them, on which they star in short movies, wear sunglasses, and talk like people. If you were told today that God was going to strike down either your two dogs or some woman in a movie wardrobe department whom you'd spoken to only a couple times, which would you choose?

ELLE : Would you sacrifice Mookie and Sam or your unborn child's small toe?

KM : Wow. There's nine other toes, right? He'll have nine toes.

ELLE : In Sex and the City, you played a guy who was only able to perform sexually in public places, like cabs and coatrooms. Have you found that there are any odd places that make you amorous?

KM : Nature is good, and swimming is good—for whatever reason, I do like water. It probably goes back to skinny-dipping in pools in high school. I was hiking on the Na Pali coast in Hawaii once, and I remember walking along and looking up and a hundred feet ahead, the way you might spot a deer, was a completely naked woman taking a bath in this river. I was transfixed. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.